


Beyond the Reach of Stars

by GreyBauer



Category: Original Work
Genre: Character Death, Drug Addiction, Drug Use, F/F, Futuristic, Immortality, LGBTQ Female Character, Lesbians in Space, Original Fiction, Original work - Freeform, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-04
Updated: 2013-06-04
Packaged: 2017-12-14 00:01:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/830356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GreyBauer/pseuds/GreyBauer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's not good way to live when you can't die. Kat was a city girl who couldn't seem to fill up the void gaping open inside her; Amelie was a Naturalist damned to die by the nature of her birth. They have eternity to spend together. And then eternity's cut short.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Beyond the Reach of Stars

We weren’t friends, at first. We were two random people in some little boutique on a busy city street, looking at very different styles of clothing. I was with a stylist, posed up on a pedestal being fitted for a peacock-blue, sequined scrap of a dress. Years later, you’d say it was _barely adherent to public decency laws,_ when you found it in our closet or I wore it out. _A strapless, clingy, jingling -- Kat, it’s awful_. 

You were sorting through the jeans on the clearance rack, probably telling yourself to keep your mouth shut. But you couldn’t and you shouted from half way across the store, “You’re not going to honestly wear that wreck, are you?”

And I, being who I was then, sliced you with a look that said, “Keep your mouth shut, whore.” And then I actually said, “Keep your mouth shut, whore,” because -- because I-don’t-know-why, anymore. Because I was a wretch, then, and I clung to my pride. I held your eyes, I raised my chin, I threw my shoulders back and looked for all the world like I didn’t give a damn about some little backwater Naturalist girl’s opinion. 

So you split my lip with your fist. And somehow, someway, between the time security pulled us off each other and we were released from our holding cell hours later, I had talked you into having coffee at my favorite cafe, despite it being three in the morning and your being offended. Despite my stupidity and my bad attitude, and all the mess that was to come.

I felt drawn to you, pulled to you, like the gravity that pulled rockets toward planets and then flung them into deep space. You were so -- solid, and different and beautiful, with your hair a mess of waves and your jeans crammed tight into mud-spattered combat boots. I felt like you were mine, so I charmed you out of not only your phone number, but your address -- off the grid, out in the forest, the structure thirty feet up in a sycamore tree. I charmed you into a first kiss that night, even though my lip stung where you’d split it earlier, even though I could tell you were tired and a little scared. 

Before we knew what happened, we were in love. 

* * *

2385, and the world hadn’t changed as much as the media had said it would. The Treatment was supposed to be a revolution, a reawakening for humanity. One little chip implanted straight into the patient’s brain-stem, and suddenly -- well, suddenly, people just didn’t die like they used to. Suddenly, people just didn’t die at all.

I was in the second generation of Treated. They had all the kinks worked out by then, a hundred percent success rate -- immortality for the children of every nation, a brave, beautiful new era for humanity. 

The scientists who pioneered the Treatment offered it free of charge. Politicians protested and tried to get their hands on it, the government tried to seize it as some sort of bio-terrorism weapon. The talking heads shouted about everything from food shortages and rising techno-discrimination to global cooling to religion in an effort to keep the people away from it. But no mother wanted to live with the knowledge that their child would one day die. The Treatment swept across the world, free and privately owned. 

The creators did everything they could to keep the government out of it and they succeeded, right up until the second-gen Treated started growing up and having children. Overpopulation became the world’s largest problem, and the Joint Nations Coalition brought down the Birth-Bans in 2220. The Naturalists split off. War broke out. People _died._

No one really knows what happened then. No one wanted to. Immortals couldn’t abide by death. 

Eventually, the peace came. The cities grew, the Naturalists remained sovereign in their forests, the government rose to prevent wars from breaking out again. The living finally forgot how to bury the dead. 

You were born a week before they started enforcing the Birth-Bans. That’s the story you told, at least. If anyone asked, you were legally born within the legal period, to genetically qualified parents with the permission of the state. One of the last Treated. 

But legal births took place in hospitals, not out in the forests, in the tree-homes of the Naturalist colonies. Legal births weren’t hidden away from the state, kept obscure by the sovereignty of Naturalist bureaucracy. And legal births didn’t leave scars on the nape of the neck, where the Treatment chip had been implanted with less-than-regulation accuracy. 

But I never asked you about your birth. I remember running my fingers over the scar when we were curled together in bed, languid, but I didn’t recognize what it meant -- or perhaps I just didn’t care. You were born more than a century and a half ago, and you were mine now. Our beginnings didn’t matter; we had eternity. 

* * *

We used to shop for dresses. There was the red silk, worn with Leia buns to the 2415 Star Wars remake premiere. The blue mass of sequins that, yes, I had bought despite your thinking it was hideous, despite you punching me in the face for it. The strappy, glittery silvers we wore for New Year, every year. The transparent Union Jack that we only wore for each other. 

Pomegranates, burgundies, electric blues and pinks, neon greens, glow-in-the-dark and tie-dyes that actually moved. Cotton, wool, latex and synth-silk and woven moon-dust, every shade and length all shoved together in a messy, too-tight rainbow in a closet too small for one, much less both, of us. 

In my apartment, of course, in the city. Naturalists didn’t wear bioluminescent mini-skirts when they set about climbing their trees. 

If we’re being honest, though, I remember you in your boots more than the dresses. _My_ dresses, really; you’d always preferred your worn-in jeans, your combat boots, your military-issue-million-pocket jacket. When you were in the city with me, it was different -- you’d wear our frilly things. But you were always just _in_ the city. You were never _of_ it, not like me. You belonged in the forest, in the trees. You were... natural. In a way that I’d never be. 

* * *

The first time I was in your tree-house, I was terrified and absolutely positive the floor would fall through. _People aren’t squirrels Amelie, they’re not meant for trees_ , I’d told you, clinging desperately to the rope ladder. Inside, I brushed off every surface before I sat on it, not wanting to get dirt on my white linen wrap. I balked when I saw your bow and arrows, treated the place like a hovel instead of the home you kept your soul in. 

You took me through your gardens, told me these were lilies and those were roses, these were carrots and those were strawberries -- you laughed when my eyes blew wide at the taste, sucked a drop of red juice from my lip. You didn’t mind that my heels left divots in the ground behind me, that my soles crushed down blades of grass in deep ovals where I tried to step lightly and failed. You took me along the rope bridges to see finches and jays, to visit the stables and ride a real horse. Somehow, someway, between the time you laced me into a pair of your combat boots and the sun set in a watercolor of brilliant shades, I’d lived more that day than in a hundred years. 

That night, in a clearing of soft grass, you named the constellations. You found mine, but I wouldn’t let you tell me the name. I kissed you once, and then again because you looked beautiful cloaked in starlight. I held you tight and tried to soak it in.

* * *

Your vice was nature. Mine was drugs. I was clean, for the first hundred years of my life, and even when I started it wasn’t the hard stuff. Synthesized THC, maybe low-concentrate ecstasy. It was responsible, just the littlest kick to change my mood, make the room spin, make the lights dance; it stayed like that for a long, long time, but everyone felt the void eventually. A pit inside, staring at you, demanding to be filled. Soft drugs didn’t fill it up, but the hard stuff -- the hard stuff made it like it never existed. 

When you met me, I’d been clean for about a month. I’d just gotten out of an away-house after a spectacular overdose on I-don’t-even-know-what -- I spent a month and a half in a coma. Widespread synaptic failure, they said. Brain-dead, by all accounts. They didn’t know if my chip would be able to fix it. 

But it did. The chips fixed everything. Sometimes, it just took longer, gave the care staff a fright. People just didn’t _die_ , like they used to. 

I stayed clean, when you came. My massive void felt like it had been filled up by you. You radiated heat and light that drove it off, my own little star. I didn’t need the hard stuff, and so at parties I eased back onto the synthesized THC, maybe low-concentrate ecstasy. It burned off by the time I came home, took the bite out of you not coming with me and the strangeness away from other people’s hands on my skin. 

* * *

Two pairs of boots, black and creased and worn, flung up on the scratched honey of a wooden table. In the middle, three empty bottles of whiskey, twenty or so shot glasses, and a half-full sleeve of soda-crackers. One pair of legs wrapped in tight jeans, tucked firmly into combat boots, the other in black lace tights and heels almost impossibly high. Glitter crushed into the soles of one, mud and probably blood spatter on the other. A party and a paradox. Quite the pair.

In the city, I was usually quiet, listening to music, watching a TV ping, curling up with you. Time-biding, you called it, until my next rush of activity. But in your treehouse, I felt the need to talk when it was silent, to fill up the gap yawning between us. You’d never understood why that space bothered me, why I thought the silence was wretched. Why I loved nightclubs, or drugs, or whiskey. Why just _being_ was so hard for me.

But you loved me and you liked soda-crackers, so you watched me drink and listened to me talk over the hush of your forest. Sometimes, you’d open up about your past, your thoughts, your beliefs, and I’d devour the information, starved for any little piece of you I could touch. I was so conscious of the void in me, so aware of you always slipping away. You were ephemeral and moving, in a world where things were solid and everyone stood still.

“We move in cycles,” you said. “Or we’re supposed to, at least.” Back before the cities rose, back before the Treatment spread, back before, before, before... We’d moved in cycles. Sunrise to sunset, childhood to old age, health to sickness, life to death. We’d slept, we’d woken, we’d eaten, we’d grown hungry -- there was always something to do, you said, always some meaning. Always something to fill up the void. 

You gave me this look, after you’d said that, and I didn’t know what it meant but it made me want to clutch you to me and hold tight. My hands were empty of you, for the seconds it lasted. There was just me, suspended over my pit.

I’d asked you, long, long ago in that coffee shop I’d charmed you into, why anyone would want to live thirty feet up in a sycamore tree. You told me that some people liked the wind and the sunrises, some people liked things that changed. I’d laughed because I was uncomfortable and I didn’t understand. “It’s beautiful up there with things that pass,” you’d said, and then you were a million miles away again, like you were now. My hands were empty then, too, but they hadn’t known the feel of you yet; I hadn’t had time to realize there was something missing. 

You started spending time away from the city, after that second look. Three or four days in your tree-house, in the hush of the forest with your combat boots thrown up on the table. You always came back and spent months in our apartment. You put on our dresses, and you smiled with me, went shopping with me, laughed and lived and loved. You were my Amelie, you clamped your hands over mine so I could hold you tighter. You never wore that million-mile stare again.

When someone offered me cocaine at a club, I took it. My hands felt full, and the pit disappeared.

* * *

You noticed, of course. How could you not? There were track marks on my arms when I came home, I was still high and stumbling around. You left it alone, the first few times.

You noticed the change, when I made the leap from ecstasy to cocaine, cocaine to meth, and then to the new cocktails that didn’t even have names yet. You left it alone then too. I think you knew that it was about making the void wink out of existence. I think you knew it was about needing to feel there was nothing empty to fill.

Eventually, we talked. You talked, actually. I listened and understood. “We move in cycles,” you said, and somehow I’d come to know that meant a lot more than the words it was made of. You always came back to me. I always came back to you. The in-betweens, the needs we couldn’t fill in each other -- somehow they were petty, they were useless. To me, it meant that we had eternity, that we remained where all else passed.

I didn’t know what it meant for you. But I knew it was enough. 

* * *

My stints without drugs got longer. The void got smaller and smaller, quieter and quieter. It showed up more often but I handled it better. I started understanding what you meant by cycles; I started comprehending why you still measured the passage of time. I went out to your tree-house again, even though I’d stayed away so often in the past. 

We watched the meteor shower of 2688, lying in the same meadow as the first time. You glowed, cloaked in starlight, and instead of holding you tight I tried to soak it in on my own. This time, you kissed me -- once and then again -- and you named the constellations but avoided naming mine. I traced the scar on the back of your neck as you fell asleep against me, and I thought, _Maybe I could live like this. Maybe I could live like you._

* * *

Drunk. Again. High. Again. 

Stumbling around, half naked as usual and in love with the kaleidoscopic light-show still crashing about behind my eyes. In love with the all-over vibration that would shake me apart. In love with the wing-beat bass of the club, the flying trill of lyrics in languages I didn't know.

I was warm all over from a hundred dances with a hundred people, pressed into myself from the crush of other bodies -- flying high and finally whole, full of starlight, void banished like it’d never been. My bones stretched out of me and into wings, and I finally, _finally_ felt free.

I wanted sex, and so did everyone else flying in that club. Someone grabbed me from behind, hands big enough to hold a whole galaxy, arms big enough to crush planets to dust, and it wasn’t enough to fly on earth anymore. I needed to be out in space, circling the stars you loved and didn’t name. 

I lost time to the kaleidoscope, head spinning and music trilling. He shoved me into a cab, but I was the one who shoved him out again, up up up on the gravity-pad, a hundred and sixty-two floors up to our apartment, up to where I could launch into the stars with you. 

I turned and kissed him as we stumbled through the front door. His hands had been everywhere, massive, callused, paddle-like oars that propelled us out of the sea of people, the flock of dancing birds. God, those hands. They’d launch me to orbit, I knew.

I climbed him, wrapped around him, giggled at how serious he looked -- like we were doing some bullshit, life-or-death deed. Idiot. But, god, those hands -- not paddles anymore, but a launchpad, a shot into space. He laughed and it wasn’t light and warm like yours. I kissed him to shut him up.

The door to the bedroom crashed open and then I was whirling down through gravity, falling onto something soft and bouncy and smelling like you. Bed, definitely a bed, and you were shouting at someone to get the hell out. Doors slamming, blood thrumming, and then the room spun a little and I lost a bit of time in the kaleidoscope again. My heartbeat throbbed a baseline while the all over vibration blotted out the ceiling and the sounds. 

I giggled, after the thrum and throb were over, turning slightly and reaching for those big, beautiful hands, starting the countdown to launch. But paddle-hands had gone when you shouted,  then you were there, my Amelie, hands cool and small and soft, ducked over me, big blue eyes shimmering and eyebrows scrunched together like crashing planets. Always so concerned.

My heartbeat-baseline was speeding up, slam-slam-slamming and it hurt. My fingers and lips were going cold. I buried my hands in your hair, kissed you to try to steal some warmth away, soak you up like starlight. 

The kaleidoscope wasn’t bright this time, all dark colors and things with sharp teeth taking me where I didn’t want to go. My heart went slam-slam-slam, too fast, too painful, and I was scared, so scared. I couldn’t hear if I screamed with the vibration drowning out reality. 

I lost more time in blackness and a tiny little me-that-looked-like-you asked me over and over what I’d taken. Somewhere in my mind where all the horrors danced, I remembered this was what overdose felt like.

The vibration amped up again, my heart faltered in its slam-slam-slam beat, and I shook apart. _Seizure_ , the me-that-looked-like-you said. _Kat, please, please, just hold on._

* * *

I woke and couldn’t move. My heart felt too slow, but my head took up its slam-slam-slam beat and kept the sounds of the room away from me. I was on my side, head tucked bent awkwardly without a pillow beneath it. I could see my hands, fingers twitching vaguely, and beyond that, a blurry sort of nightmare. There were people in the doorway, dressed up in black and aiming guns at you, my Amelie. Your hair was wavy and wild, scar showing just slightly at the nape of your neck, and my fingers itched to trace it, to cover it up, to get them away. Your shoulders were thrown back, your oversized t-shirt pulled almost too high to be decent, and I ached all over to yell, to warn you, because these were monsters, these were the things with teeth that terrified me -- 

You had an arrow notched and aimed at the closest one, saying something loud that banged around in my head until the vibration shut it out. You drew your arrow back further, ready to shoot, but they were fast, faster, faster than the slam-slam-slam of my heartbeat before. They yanked you back by the hair, forced you onto your knees, stuck you with a syringe full of something -- but the kaleidoscope was back then, whirling me away on an updraft, and I felt my bones stretching out, air under me, head light, like a bird in the sky. 

* * *

The next day, when I woke up down on the ground again, paddle-hands was gone and I’d forgotten all the important parts of the night before. The apartment was quiet over the hush of the city outside. Our dresses were in the closet, our shoes lined up and orderly underneath them. Your bow was tucked in the corner neatly next to its quiver of arrows. 

But your boots weren’t there, or your jeans, your shirt, your military-issue-million-pocket jacket. You weren’t anywhere in the apartment. You weren’t in your treehouse. You had your contact interface disabled.

You were gone, you’d left. I was alone with the pit, ust me and my empty hands.

* * *

I lost so much time. It didn’t matter, I had eternity. But I remember that slipping feeling, the tick-tock-tick-tock of losing weeks and months. 

I made cocktails of cocaine, meth, PCP. I made cocktails of the cocktails that didn’t have names yet. Eventually I didn’t know what I was taking, just that I danced and danced and ignored the pit that wouldn’t go away. I tried to grow my wings again, feel them sprout out and up and behind me, tried to feel like I was flying away. I tried to find drugs that made things burn and shine, tried to feel like I’d finally soaked in a star, eaten it up, wrapped around it and gorged. 

Nothing really worked. My kaleidoscopic light-show always seemed to look like you. Time dragged on, and your cycles were bullshit. Nothing changed, nothing mattered, a part of me wanted to burn your sycamore down.

* * *

I woke up between highs to a semi-robotic voice in my ear. I passed out again before I understood what it was saying. My chip was having a hard time keeping me alive, anymore.

When I woke the second time, the voice was still there, and I ignored it because it hurt my head. There was a ping on my contact interface on a feed I wasn’t familiar with. I let my head throb for a minute, tried to ignore the sharp buzzing in my ears, and blinked twice to activate the inter-retinal display, watching the words scroll by and not understanding. 

Official notification. Legally recognized next of kin. Neuro-synaptic malfunction. Remains available for claim. 

At the very bottom of the ping, down past the incomprehensible lines, down past the words that didn’t make sense, there was a picture of you. Next to it, incomprehensible and meaningless, a neat little line of letters and numbers. 

_Amelie Sagitta. 7-16-2222 to 8-19-2688._

Eventually, I recognized the voice in my ear again, a calm woman on the other end of my audio feed saying somewhat emphatically, “Ma’am, are you there?”

She explained it all, deadly careful. Quiet. Very official. Confirmation that you were born after the 2220 population legislation. Strict enforcement on all such cases, once discovered. Held by the government for four months. Chip failed, eventually, as all improperly implanted chips eventually do. Only a matter of time. Nothing they could have done for you. Personal effects available at the morgue. Body prepared for collection. Contact information for a very quiet funeral home. 

Assurance that my communications would be monitored, so the state could assist me in the event of any problems or unnatural desires. Insistence that it was for the sake of my tenuous health. Recommendations that I take a few months for myself, alone, to try and overcome my grief.  

The connection cut, and I sat quietly for a moment, remembering how to breath and feel and move. Letting the words rattle around in my addled brain, trying to convince myself the drugs had driven the love of you out of me, even though every ounce of it was still there. 

They’d killed you. They’d kill me if I told.

* * *

Soon the sun would rise, bright and hot in a cloudless sky. Birds would sing in the trees. Their artless warble would pierce the quiet. Finches, in this area, maybe jays.

The grass was crisp, slightly dewy, the soil beneath soft and dark and giving. My heels left divots in the ground behind me; my soles crushed down leaves of grass in deep ovals where I tried to step lightly and failed. Tracks. Human. Moving slowly, laboriously, and unprepared for this terrain -- carrying something too heavy, perhaps. I was an easy catch, bound down to the ground. Couldn’t climb trees in my state. Couldn’t fly. I ached in all the soft spots of my body, the vulnerable places a hunter would aim an arrow; just below the ribs, to the left and right of my spine. My neck, my eyes, my stomach. And of course, my heart, the tougher target, caged in by bone and muscle, harder to hit, but possible with just the right angle, _possible,_ a challenge, a thrill --

But how to honor the dead?

There was an emptiness to this wide open space, a broad field dotted with stones and trees, the breeze caressing it lovingly. The sky was a watercolor, soft pastels mixing in the liquid of a rising sun. No light-shows and kaleidoscopes. Nothing flying in this place, not at dawn, not with the biting chill in the air. No bright rainbow dresses, just the stretching of shadows in the early light, casting the tombstones in sharp relief. 

I’d never been to a funeral. There hadn’t been dead to bury for hundreds of years -- most of the rituals were lost. The immortals couldn’t abide by death... but soon the sun would rise. For now, there was a yawning pit before me, and a box -- _a casket, Amelie would want the proper terms, Amelie delighted in obscure things like this_ \-- to be lowered down into the dark. 

It seemed far too deep, down there, like burying someone out on the far edges of the galaxy, beyond the reach of stars. But no one knew the proper depth for corpses, anymore. Immortals had no need for graves. 

If I felt called to climb into that void with you, I ignored it. You were gone, your gravity with you. I let them cover you in dirt, and I refused to cry. 

* * *

2694, and the world looked as different as they’d said it would, just not in the same way. My apartment in the city was gone, as were the dresses. I’d left your combat boots by your headstone, planted lilies and roses by your grave; you were the only one with flowers, and if I climbed to the top of your sycamore -- our sycamore, I lived there too, now -- I could see you, sleeping peaceful in a bed of grass. 

I’d joined your colony because though I couldn’t die, there were parts of you I couldn’t live without. I was clean again, excepting my addiction to starlight and learning the constellations’ names. I was slowly coming to breathe, to feel how the world moved around me. To pause, listen, see that I had all the time in the world to feel that I had no time at all. 

 _We had eternity_ , said your headstone. An endless stream of days and lives to learn the lessons we needed. You’d just managed it first, like always, thrown the first punch and hit me in the face when I was stupid. _It’s awful, Kat,_ you’d say, _the way you live, the way you treat yourself. You see, don’t you? You have to see._

I didn’t expect you to die to open my eyes. That was never what I wanted. But my own little star went supernova just to teach me how to begin again, to show me that the universe was beautiful and I could take it. I could come to terms with a death like that, fly with it even. 

I tucked my jeans firmly into combat boots, dark brown leather worn well after six years and spattered with mud and blood. I shouldered your bow and arrow, gave an old-fashioned army salute to the home you kept your soul in. Breathed. Stepped out into the sun.


End file.
